SOURCE: "Statement and Artifice in Thomas Gray," in Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, Vol. V, No. 3, Summer, 1965, pp. 519-32.

In the following essay, Spacks analyzes the language of "Ode on the Spring," "Sonnet on the Death of Mr. West," and "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,"focusing on Gray's use of alternating rhetorical patterns.

The man of whom Adam Smith wrote, "[he] joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and harmony of Pope, and … nothing is wanting to render him, perhaps, the first poet in the English language, but to have written a little more," has been dismissed by Dr. Leavis, relegated by Donald Davie to the limbo reserved for those whose diction is impure, and attacked by A. R. Humphreys for embodying the worst poetic evils of his day. Time has not on the whole been kind to Thomas Gray.

One reason for modern...